The Telegraph
Birdy ★★★☆☆ Ah, sweet Birdy of youth. The age of 24 is pretty young to be staging a comeback, but it’s getting on for four years since the tender English chanteuse last appeared on stage, and five since she released an album. Her livestream from a spookily empty Wilton Music Hall in London demonstrated that this former teen prodigy can be viewed as both an early starter and late developer. Jasmine Lucinda Elizabeth Jennifer van den Bogaerde was just 12 when she won the Open Mike UK competition, dropping (perhaps understandably) her given name for a more manageable childhood nickname. Her mother is a concert pianist, her father is an author, and she is related to the late, great movie star Dirk Bogarde. At 13 she scored a massive breakout hit with a fragile version of Bon Iver’s Skinny Love (currently clocking up over half a billion streams on Spotify). Her early success came in what might be considered the John Lewis ad genre: tremulous acoustic versions of gritty alt-rock ballads. Birdy’s return to the stage retained five covers from her 2011 debut album, including People Help the People by Cherry Ghost, Shelter by The XX and Terrible Love by The National. By contrast, she only performed one of her own songs from the 2013 sophomore album Fire Within and none from 2016’s rather stilted indie-rock follow-up Beautiful Lies. Her career has largely been sustained by appearances on the soundtrack to young-adult films such as The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars, where her emotional ballads took on the soaring tones of Coldplay at a finishing school. By 2017, at the age of 19, Birdy was talking about writer’s block and the need to take time off to gain life experience. The music business is notorious for pushing young talents towards premature burnout. But on the evidence of her return to the stage, Birdy has used the time well. Eight self-penned songs previewed her forthcoming fourth album, Young Heart, exhibiting a new musical voluptuousness and maturity. Fifteen musicians were arrayed on two socially distanced levels of the faintly decrepit Music Hall, with strings and horns on the upper balcony and Birdy’s seven-piece band downstairs. There was delicacy and detail to the interaction of all the musical parts, concocting a sonorous glide over which the singer’s immaculate vocals had space to flutter and soar. In an old-fashioned lacy white dress, Birdy looked a bit like a Victorian ghost haunting the atmospherically lit venue. She flitted between instruments, moving from piano to various guitars, and even took off on a journey upstairs to sing with the orchestra. Songs such as Voyager and Little Blue bore traces of familiar 1970s Laurel Canyon templates, from Joni Mitchell to Jackson Brown, but in their most interesting moments they pushed towards something almost psychedelic, notably on the free-flowing coda to Celestial Dancer. It sounds as if Birdy has arrived in a musical space that she can make her own. The almost imperious confidence of her delivery demonstrated that she really is a precious talent – perhaps too precious. It can be hard work digesting this much new music, and Birdy didn’t seem faintly interested in making it any easier. She uttered not a word for almost an hour and a half. With 20-second gaps between songs, all that could be heard was the rustle of players shuffling about and getting into position. It was like bearing witness to some solemn private ceremony, creating a tension that the performances never fully released, and yet another reminder that concerts without audiences are missing the most crucial ingredient of all. Some flesh-and-blood interaction might have helped Birdy to really take flight. Neil McCormick Young Heart will be released on Atlantic on April 30
